Achievement Unlocked: Going Live

Set the scene

A week ago, I started thinking about one of my past failures.

About a year and a half ago I had a business idea where my only goal, literally, was to go live and start selling.

The idea was a date subscription box, where subscribers would receive everything they need, for a date at home.

If you know me outside of work, you may know I love organising dates for my husband and I. Not long after my daughter was born, we started doing alphabet dating.

Long story short, this is where you and your partner each take turns arranging dates based on a theme. So first A could be Australian BBQ, B could be Books and Beer.. and so on..

Now, I was very excited about this business idea.

I set up a site on Shopify and created a Facebook page and Instagram page.

I even got stickers printed.

But then I came across a small problem regarding logistics and I decided to stop before I even started.

(There are still some remnants of my failure online if you are nosey - I like to keep them up, for now, so I am reminded of something I was passionate about before.)

• Here is the Twitter page with a grand total of 0 followers.
• The Instagram page, where I got a bit further and wrote TWO posts
• The Facebook page where I nagged encouraged all my Sweden-based friends to like my page.

Now I’d like to reflect on my experience of writing and then actually publishing Starting Your Software Testing Career.

Writing the eBook

I started to write my book in October or November 2020. I mainly used my phone for this and would be tapping away on my phone after my daughter had fallen asleep in my arms.

At this stage, I didn’t know whether or not it would be a blog series or something more. All I really wanted to do was to write down my thoughts and hopefully help some people by writing.

I took a few months hiatus to focus on other things in my spare time and then came back to this when I was heavily pregnant with my second child.

Towards the end of last year I decided to properly expand what I had been writing and to not just have a bunch of jumbled thoughts on Google docs.

At some point I realised that I wanted it to become a book and that it would be way too lengthy for a blog series.

I slowly turned my bullet points organised into chapters and subchapters into paragraphs on Leanpub.

I decided to seek reviewers, in hope that I could get some valuable feedback. I also wanted to mitigate the risk of becoming blind to my own creation.

What was my goal?

When I was getting closer towards an MVP, my husband asked me what is your goal with the eBook?

I thought about this.

And I told him:

To be honest, my only goal is to actually publish it.

I thought about it some more and I refined my answer.

It was more than that:

I didn’t want to just publish a book. I wanted to publish something I could be proud of and I felt would deliver concrete value to the people who bought it.

Presales

I decided to have a presale on Gumroad.

The truth is I actually utilised presales to make sure I went live with something.

While credit cards were not charged when people initially signed up (they were charged when I published the first version of the book), I didn’t want to waste people’s time by having then pre-order a book that they would never receive.

I remember when that first email from Gumroad came through, a few minutes after I announced the presale on LinkedIn, I was thinking:

Looks like I will publish the book.

Achievement Unlocked

Not long after the presale, I published my book on Gumroad and Leanpub.

I was pretty damn proud of myself because I followed through.

As time passed and people started to reach out to me directly or write positive comments about the book, I realised that the second part of my goal had also been met.